Council finally defines the city’s ‘core services’

After four failed attempts, City Council finally came up with a definition of the city’s core services Monday, selecting “public safety, water and wastewater, streets and drainage and solid waste management” as the primary responsibilities to taxpayers.

The definition isn’t binding, but is meant to guide conversations about possible cuts as the city braces for a roughly $120 million budget deficit next fiscal year. Council members began meeting weekly with department heads in October, parsing which city services should be preserved, which could be done more efficiently and those that could be slashed come spring.

“The question is ‘why do we exist as a local government?’” Councilman C.O. “Brad” Bradford said. “If we get to the point where we have to lay off personnel or cut back in services, it’s going to be very helpful if we have some consensus on what we view as core services.”

Council members voted 10-2 to approve the one-sentence definition, with councilmen Larry Green and David Robinson both voting “no”. Council agreed to cut a second sentence that stated the city’s goals “are to improve quality of life and enhance economic growth throughout Houston.”

Council Member Ellen Cohen, chair of the city’s Quality of Life Committee, said everyone supports those goals, but that doesn’t make them core services.

“It’s fluff,” Cohen said. “If we’re serious about core services, if we’re really serious, and if we have to make cuts, we’ve got to look at the first sentence and say ‘does it fall under here?’”

That council came up with a definition at all marked something of a victory. Lack of preparation, trouble getting a quorum and disagreement over semantics rendered the one-sentence definition a month-long project.

Budget and Fiscal Affairs Chairman Stephen Costello first tried to craft a definition at the end of September before council members began their department meetings. But council members said then they wanted more time and kicked it to the first core services meeting.

At that meeting, they pushed it to the next meeting because Bradford, who long has called for a core services discussion, was absent. When the next meeting rolled around, council members wanted more time to mull whether goals like “quality of life” belonged in the definition.

Then, at the most recent core services meeting, council members appeared on the brink of deciding on a definition, but lack of a quorum and a surplus of wording issues — is “garbage” or “solid waste” a more delicate way to describe trash? — prompted council members to once again postpone the vote to Monday’s Budget and Fiscal Affairs Committee meeting.

And though the vote finally came to pass Monday, both Green and Robinson questioned why they couldn’t spend more time meeting with departments and potentially improving the definition.

“The words here seem vague, bland and relatively uninspired,” Robinson said. “For me, it’s a reductive way to describe the city government … I find myself wondering ‘is this really the City of Houston we’re talking about?’”